Class Issues 11-16-05

This week the Sun-times ran a series of articles on the fragile Black middle Class.  On Monday the article featured a 26 year old Black Investment Banker who moved into Bronzeville sitting in his condo on the front cover with a quote that basically said that poor people on government subsidies actually have no right to any land because taxpayers are paying their rent so he feels no guilt about pushing poor people out.  He further goes on to state that he doubts that most of these people ever have to go downtown so it really doesn’t matter if they live in Bronzeville or if they live on 105^th St.

 

For those of you that don’t know Bronzeville is like many sections in large cities all across the country that is going through gentrification.  It was a poor minority neighborhood where people started to build condos and all of a sudden “the hood” has $350,000 condos.  The problem of course is Niggas like the man mentioned above.  (apologies to anyone offended by the N-word but hey…)  See the issue is that once a lot of cats get a little of an education and their first job, too many cats get their noses stuck up in the air, and the so-called noble goals of gentrification are lost because people are nor reinvesting in the Black community they are merely the next generation of people trying to get rich off of the exploitation.  The worse part about it is that most of these people really haven’t made anything.  We as a people are too often fooled into believing that we have “made it” once we get our first good job.  Let’s forget that we have no wealth, and let’s forget that the job is not even promised forever.  Instead some decide to show their ass based on some outdated concept of superiority until they are smacked back to earth by the hard reality of how far they really have left to go.

 

It’s like the interesting thing about the glass ceiling that everyone talks about.  The fact is that most people never really hit the glass ceiling.  In order to hit the glass ceiling you have to play the game so well that when there is no other “legitimate” reason to not advance you, the answer just becomes “no.”  Very few minorities ever reach that point, and it is not to lessen the travails that many people face in corporate environments but it is just to remind people to keep their eyes on the prize…  As they said in American Pie “You haven’t scored until you score…”  So keep yourself in check.